Digital Theory

Summary

Fall 2018 launch

Digital technologies permeate our culture today, leaving virtually no area of meaning-making untouched. Vast social media platforms struggle to cope with the political consequences of their own scale, economics increasingly acknowledges a new type of capital in digital data, and artificial intelligence has gained an infrastructural role in our societies through the help of planetary-scale computing.

The Digital Theory H-Lab seeks to develop and maintain the broad-based, interdisciplinary conceptual framework necessary for understanding and transforming the way we live in and with the digital.

Employing a workshop-based, collaborative learning approach to the history and theory of the digital, the Lab fosters projects and writing that contribute to a theoretical framework for understanding the nature of the digital. We have a particular focus on machine learning and the new AI, including neural nets and large language models. Some results have been published in Critical Inquiry, and the Lab maintains a regular local meeting schedule as well as a talk and works-in-progress series in hybrid format with our international affiliates.

Activity

• ChatGPT Broke the Turing Test
• Digital Theory Lab Syllabus
• Humanities+ | Collaborative Research
• Large Language Models and Culture: Digital Theory Summer School II
• Signs of Artificial Life: N. Katherine Hayles
• Signs of Artificial Life: Symposium
• Signs of Artificial Life: Terrence W. Deacon
• Surplus Data
• Surplus Data: A Special Issue of Critical Inquiry
• What is Digital Theory?

Lab Team

• Leif Weatherby
  Director, Associate Professor, Department of German, Arts and Science
• David Bering-Porter
  Assistant Professor, Culture and Media, The New School
• Audrey Borowski
  Research Fellow in the Research Project Desirable Digitalization, Center fro Science and Thought, University of Bonn
• Mercedes Bunz
  Professor of Digital Culture and Society, King’s College London
• Zachary Coble
  Head, Digital Scholarship Services, NYU Bobst Library
• M. Beatrice Fazi
  Reader in Digital Humanities, University of Sussex
• Seb Franklin
  Reader in Literature, Media, and Theory, King’s College London
• Lisa Gitelman
  Professor, Media and English, Steinhardt
• Matthew Handelman
  Associate Professor of German, Michigan State University
• Ryan Healy
  Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, Arts and Science
• Samuel Kellogg
  Doctoral Candidate, Media Culture and Communication, Steinhardt
• Jeffrey W. Kirkwood
  Associate Professor of Art History, Binghamton University, State University o New York
• Joseph Lemelin
  Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Stony Brook
• Kathrin Maurer
  Professor Mso for Humanities and Technology, University of Southern Denmark
• Emma Rae Bruml Norton
  Doctoral Student, Media Culture and Communication, Steinhardt
• Alijan Ozkiral
  Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, Arts and Science
• Joshua Scannell
  Assistant Professor, Media Studies, The New School
• Clifford Siskin
  Professor, English and American Literature, Arts and Science
• Rory Solomon
  Program Director and Assistant Professor of Code as a Liberal Art, The New School
• Claire Y. Song
  Doctoral candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Arts and Science